by Xavier Clot
Shortlisted: PureTravel Writing Competition 2025
I never truly knew my father.
He left Kenya before I was born, settling in England with my mother and never looking back. Growing up, he spoke little about where he came from, and even less about the reasons he left. When he passed suddenly two years ago, all I had were fragments; old photos, the scent of sandalwood on his shirts, and a dog-eared notebook filled with field sketches of trees.
In the back of that notebook, I found a single name: Ngare Ndare.
It sounded like a place out of legend, something sung around fires, or whispered between children daring each other into the woods. I googled it, of course. A lush forest in central Kenya, known for its blue pools and sky bridges. A place where elephants still roam, and leopards watch from the shadows. But also: a place in danger.
The turning point came when I booked the flight.
I told myself it was for closure. A quiet pilgrimage. Nothing more. I’d see the trees he once sketched and finally understand why he’d drawn so many acacias, so many fig trees with their roots knotted like veins. But somewhere between Heathrow and Nairobi, that changed. Maybe it was the notebook in my bag. Or the way his handwriting leaned; always to the left, like he was already looking back.
Ngare Ndare wasn’t easy to reach. My driver dropped me hours from the forest’s edge, where red earth blurred into shadowy green. I walked the final stretch under the curious gaze of colobus monkeys. Every step forward felt like peeling back the skin of the past.
The forest air smelled of rain, of loam and leaves and something older. Timeless. I met the ranger, Wanjiku, by the ranger post; a woman whose handshake was firm and eyes sharp as flint.
“You’re his son?” she asked, without me saying.
I nodded.
“He helped us start the seed nursery,” she said, voice softening. “It’s still going.”
I blinked. “I didn’t know that.”
She smiled. “He wouldn’t have told you. He didn’t want praise. Just progress.”
That afternoon, she led me down winding trails to a clearing filled with saplings. A small wooden sign read: Tumaini: Hope.
“He believed we could bring the forest back,” she said, gesturing at the rows of tiny shoots in black grow-bags. “We were losing the canopy fast. Charcoal burning, illegal logging, drought. But your father convinced donors to help fund this nursery.”
I crouched beside a young podo tree, no taller than my knee. A green thing, trembling in the wind, and yet; determined. The way he must have been.
That was the moment something shifted.
He wasn’t just the silent man who stirred honey into his tea, or stood too long by the garden window. He had lived a whole chapter I never read. And here it was, iin the cracked hands of the workers, in the rows of green fighting for space. In the red dirt caked on his old boots now sitting in my closet back home.
Over the next week, I stayed in a ranger’s hut just off the trail. I helped water saplings, cleared weeds, and joined in on planting days with schoolchildren and volunteers. We dug through tired soil, planted hope by hand.
One morning, Wanjiku handed me a sapling: Warburgia ugandensis, East African greenheart.
“It was his favorite,” she said.
“Why?”
“He said it was stubborn,” she grinned. “Hard to grow, but worth it.”
We walked up a hillside recently cleared of lantana. The sun was hot, the air buzzing with insects and the sharp scent of crushed sage. Together, we planted it. My hands were blistered, my shirt soaked with sweat. But as I pressed soil around the roots, I felt something break open; something warm and ancient and strangely calm.
I had never felt closer to him.
And perhaps never closer to the Earth.
Before I left, Wanjiku showed me a wall in the ranger station. Photos lined it; rangers, schoolchildren, visiting scientists. In the corner, there was one of my father. He was younger, smiling with a hand on a boy’s shoulder. Behind him, the nursery was no more than five saplings and a dream.
“We were his forest, too,” she said.
On the plane home, I didn’t sleep.
Instead, I reread his notebook, page by page. I recognized trees now; cordia, croton, sycamore fig. I began to sketch them myself, awkward but earnest. I realized I hadn’t gone to Ngare Ndare to find him.
I had gone to continue him.
That was two years ago.
Since then, I’ve returned twice; once to volunteer again, once just to walk beneath the trees he helped plant. Some are taller now. The forest is healing.
So am I.
I now work in conservation communications, telling stories about reforestation and community-led efforts across East Africa. I keep a photo of the sapling we planted now head-high on my desk. And when I give talks or write articles, I share this truth:
We don’t travel just to see the world. We travel to return to something we never knew we’d lost.
For me, the turning point was in the soil of Ngare Ndare. It was in the stubborn tree that refused to die. It was in the forest that gave me back my father not in memory, but in legacy.And I have never stopped planting since.
Photo by muthengi mbuvi on Unsplash
